Book Review: Cultural geography

Abstract

of loss of (a mythical?) rural England. Mortonian rurality, and many others in the same genre, are about an old England that has gone but endures even today in imagined places in books, cinema or television (Brideshead Revisited and Heartbeat) and in actuality, as it were, in Ireland. The Irish west is a complex layering of texts, incorporating scenic sublimity, economic marginality and remoteness from the metropolis. Gaelic revivalists constructed it as a bastion of Gaelic nationalism, excoriated in Sean O Faoláin’s 1941 reference to ‘wildness, bawneens, poteen and traditional songs’. Others from England and the east of Ireland appropriated it as a substitute for a lost rurality. Both images were constructed by outsiders – the tourists observed by the poet Patrick Kavanagh who came to look at the peasant in his ‘lyrical fields’ from whose (premodern, traditional) tyranny Kavanagh, and others, such as the writer Edna O’Brien, escaped. Outsider perceptions of the west of Ireland as a timeless world of rural tranquillity continue in the popular imagination: recently an Irish Times report on urbanites moving to the west of Ireland quoted one Dubliner: ‘there’s something about the Shannon – when you cross that river you leave Europe. There’s a softness, a gentleness, a civilization here.’ Ryle’s invocation of former prime minister de Valera’s much-quoted 1943 address, which in many ways is emblematic of a rural Ireland that never was, serves to highlight some of the contradictions in English conceptions of rurality in Ireland, and the address may contain the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the rural landscape so prized by travellers and tourists. De Valera envisioned a ‘countryside bright with cosy homesteads’. The Land Acts of approximately a century ago, which gave legal ownership to the occupying tenant farmers, mean that the Irish rural landscape today is owned outright by in excess of 150 000 individuals. Trends in future planning seem determined to exceed the rural settlement densities aspired to by de Valera, with unpredictable consequences for the countryside and its writers and visitors in the future. Ryle’s book is a wide-ranging review of the literature of English and some Irish travellers and tourists in Ireland. It is at times complex in construction, but always interesting, and demonstrates a keen sense of the literature on representation of Irish place and identity. Ryle himself has many deeply felt personal asides on cycling trips throughout the ‘warm, wild and wonderful’ west of Ireland (to quote the tourist brochure), so that his readings are solidly grounded in experience of landscapes and people.